Book Image

Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

By : Ganesh Sanjiv Naik
Book Image

Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

By: Ganesh Sanjiv Naik

Overview of this book

Python has evolved over time and extended its features in relation to every possible IT operation. Python is simple to learn, yet has powerful libraries that can be used to build powerful Python scripts for solving real-world problems and automating administrators' routine activities. The objective of this book is to walk through a series of projects that will teach readers Python scripting with each project. This book will initially cover Python installation and quickly revise basic to advanced programming fundamentals. The book will then focus on the development process as a whole, from setup to planning to building different tools. It will include IT administrators' routine activities (text processing, regular expressions, file archiving, and encryption), network administration (socket programming, email handling, the remote controlling of devices using telnet/ssh, and protocols such as SNMP/DHCP), building graphical user interface, working with websites (Apache log file processing, SOAP and REST APIs communication, and web scraping), and database administration (MySQL and similar database data administration, data analytics, and reporting). By the end of this book, you will be able to use the latest features of Python and be able to build powerful tools that will solve challenging, real-world tasks
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

The urllib package

Like http, urllib is also a package that has various modules for working with URLs. The urllib module allows you to access several websites via your script. We can also download data, parse data, modify headers, and more using this module.

urllib has a few different modules, which are listed here:

  • urllib.request: This is used for opening and reading URLs.
  • urllib.error: This contains exceptions raised by urllib.request.
  • urllib.parse: This is used for parsing URLs.
  • urllib.robotparser: This is used for parsing robots.txt files.

In this section, we are going to learn about opening a URL using urllib and how to read html files from the URL. We are going to see a simple example of the use of urllib. We will import urllib.requests. Then we assign the opening of the URL to a variable, then we will use a .read() command to read the data from the URL.

Create a url_requests_example...